After the premiere at the Rome Film Festival, the first episode of Mike, a Rai TV miniseries directed by Giuseppe Bonito and written by Salvatore De Mola, based on Mike Bongiorno’s autobiographical book *La versione di Mike*, airs today on Rai 1. Cinematography by Alfredo Betrò CCS. Silvia Tarquini interviewed him.
How is the series structured? How is the life of Mike Bongiorno portrayed?
The setting of the story begins in the early 1940s in Italy, during the Second World War, and reaches the great television successes of Rai in the 1970s, with a careful focus on the protagonist’s public and private events. I, despite the presenter’s great fame, did not know much about his personal story and I became fascinated by the account of the most significant aspects of his life: from his early years as a journalist in Italy to the dangers of his experience as a partisan courier who narrowly escaped execution multiple times, and finally to his return to his hometown, New York, where he began his radio career and witnessed the development of television.
You had to reconstruct the origins of television…
I researched as much as possible about the television programme presented by Mike, gathering images from the Rai archives and the Bongiorno Foundation. The television broadcasts, of course, were in black and white at the time. For the first Rai programme presented by Bongiorno in 1953, titled Arrivi e partenze, we found only a few photographs; for Lascia o raddoppia, we referred to some images from the Archivio Luce and to a 1956 film with Totò, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque. For Rischiatutto, we had access to many episodes available on RaiPlay.
How did you work on the scenes set in the television studios?
To realise the scenes set in the television studios, I carefully studied the lighting schemes of the time, which primarily used point lighting with a classic structure: key-diffused-backlight. Back then, the fill light was mainly achieved with projectors positioned in line with the camera. A television studio had numerous light sources, making it challenging to control multiple shadows, which is something cinematographers are always very attentive to. I therefore used tungsten projectors with Fresnel lenses directed with slight diffusion for the key and backlight. For the fill light, to avoid multiple shadows, I employed more modern sources but still used tungsten lamps, such as Chimera Pancakes. There was a lengthy preparatory dialogue with the chief electrician, Paolo Bolognini, starting from the concept of historical plausibility and, of course, considering the preparation time we had available. Black-and-white television was often lit by lighting artists with a cinematic background. I remember broadcasts like *Studio Uno* or *Milleluci*, which featured striking lighting with heavy use of chiaroscuro, especially during song performances, while the audience was often subdued, not yet becoming a co-protagonist of the shows.
The series is very complex, spanning time from the 1940s to the 1970s, and geographically from Italy to New York…
Yes, there were various other photographic requirements for depicting the episodes of Mike’s public and private life over about 30 years. Director Giuseppe Bonito and I discussed every phase at length; for the scenes set in New York, we carefully analysed the beautiful photographs of Saul Leiter, from which we drew inspiration by studying the many images taken in Kodachrome. Great credit must go to our set designers Maurizio Zecchin and Angela Bellora, as well as our costume designer, Fiorenza Cipollone, who had to represent very different eras; their work was invaluable for the lighting atmospheres I recreated.
The photographic result seems extraordinary, including the post-production work…
With Giovanni Bivi, the senior colourist at Flat Parioli who assisted me, we tried removing the colour, and the similarity to the original black-and-white broadcasts was very high. With director Bonito, a great photography enthusiast, the dialogue about the visual metaphors through which a story is told is ongoing and continues throughout the production. Initially, in choosing the optics, the intention was to go for Technovision-Cooke anamorphic lenses, but after various tests, we preferred an image with less distortion, so the final choice was directed towards the Laowa Proteus lenses, a manufacturer that is gaining a good international reputation. For the camera, I preferred the Sony Venice 2. I had already used the Venice 1 in Boris 4 and Idoli delle donne; the Venice 2 performs much better than its predecessor in high lights. Massimo Proietti from D-Vision constantly supported us during the testing and preparation phases. I also want to mention Michele Misiti and Pierpaolo Gualà for their kindness and attention to the needs of the project.
Thanks Alfredo.
The images published here were taken by still photographer Fabrizio De Blasio; at the moment, film stills cannot be released, but the post-production of the photos was supervised by Giovanni Bivi, the senior colourist at Flat Parioli, who oversaw the entire project.
